Northampton City Council to vote on $68.7 million budget

NORTHAMPTON – The city’s fiscal 2011 budget is in the eye of the beholder, as well as in the wallet of the taxpayer.

The City Council Thursday is scheduled tol take a first vote on a general fund budget of $68,720,955 to pay for the city’s needs in the coming fiscal year. However, that number falls almost $6 million short of the $74,595,484 general fund budget that Mayor Mary Clare Higgins set out in the budget proposal she circulated last month.

As Finance Director Christopher B. Pile explained it, it has not gotten any less expensive to run the city in the last few weeks. The reason for the discrepancy is that the number before the council does not include spending over which it has no say. Among this is funding that comes from the state and gets paid back to the state for items such as school choice and school lunches.

Christopher B. Pile The budget the council votes on consists mostly of local tax revenues and fees. Nor does the $68.7 million budget before the council account for $1.5 million from the Ambulance Fund. That fund is generated by fees that the Fire Department charges for its ambulance service and is used by the department to continue running the ambulances. The council will vote separately to appropriate the Ambulance Fund money in July, Pile said, although it figures in the $74.6 million budget presented by Higgins.

In fact, neither of those budgets is really the amount of money it will cost to operate the city in fiscal 2011. That figure is a little more than $87 million. The difference between the $74.5 million budget and the $87 million number is the amount of money in three enterprise funds: water, sewer and solid waste. Those funds are generated by user fees and allow the Department of Public Works to operate the water and sewer systems, as well as the landfill and the wastewater treatment plant. The council will vote separately to appropriate the $5 million sewer enterprise fund, the $6.6 million water fund and the $3.3 million solid waste fund, none of which is figured in the general fund budget.

Pile said Wednesday that compiling the budget is a four-month process that begins in February when he and the mayor start crunching numbers. They adjust the numbers when the governor proposes his state budget, knowing that the amount of state aid to Northampton and other communities is likely to change after the House of Representatives passes its budget. Meanwhile, Pile and Higgins meet with the heads of all the city departments to get their estimates of how much money they will need in the coming year. Health insurance costs, one of the biggest expenditures, is also a moving target that usually doesn’t get finalized until April.